Re: position on changing defaults?

[Miles Bader]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:
>     You also need to handle the case where you have use shifted arrow
>     to mark the region, and then use an unshifted arrow ... which should
>     deactivate the mark.
>
>     It seems like a simpler solution would be to have special events 
>     like <shift-down> <shift-up> <meta-down> <meta-up> etc....
>
> Why not just bind the shifted and unshifted arrow keys to new commands?
> We only need 8 of them.

Actually in usual practice, this feature is used with many other
movement commands too, not just the arrow keys -- for instance, S-C-home
will highlight to the beginning of the buffer in typical MS-type apps
(so in emacs, that should work, and so should S-M-<), and S-M-right will
highlight the next word (so in emacs S-M-f should do so as well).

Emacs could just exhaustively bind the shifted versions of all common
movement commands, but of course this is a bit brittle (user rebindings
won't be automatically handled).

There's also the "_non_-shifted movement should _deactivate_ the region"
issue which Kim mentioned earlier; it occurs to me that perhaps that
could be handled simply by having "shift activation" (activating the
region by using a shifted movement command) add a _temporary_
post-command hook, which would take care of deactivating the mark
appropriately, and would then remove itself from the post-command-hook
list.  While it would still be using post-command-hook, I think this
would be much better than the current cua mechanism, because it limits
the use of post-command-hook to only those periods when this feature is
actually actively in use.

[This "temporary post-command-hook" method should work with the
"modifier bindings" method (i.e., allowing bindings of modifier keys
which would match all otherwise-unbound events having those modifiers) I
suggested earlier as well.]

-Miles

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